You are sitting at your computer, cursor blinking on your calendar app, eyes shifting back and forth from your written plan to your calendar:

Blog post last week… missed

Sales page… partially finished

Emails to promotional partners… unsent

You rub the bridge of your nose as you glance at the clearly written plan sitting on your desk. Daily tasks, weekly projects, monthly and quarterly objectives: each and every step set out and ready to act on.

All you had to do was follow each step, one after the other.

But it didn’t happen. Day in and day out, you dodged tasks and missed important milestones. Now with just days until everything is supposed to go live, you are behind on your plan.

Oh, and what’s that sound getting louder? Has somebody invited the entrepreneur’s best friends over? Have doubt, inadequacy, and maybe even shame come to visit you and your failed plans?

What happened?

What happened is that productivity systems — whether you use a book, paper, or an app — are missing an important factor, and that omission is leading to your sabotaging your own best-laid plans. Productivity systems forget to take the COST OF THE PLANS into account.[Read more…]